Monthly Archives: February 2017

This speech was delivered to Tampa City Council in the morning of Thursday February 23rd under the unanimous approval of CLT regarding the concrete needs of the houseless proletariat.

Dear Council members,

Every morning, our neighbors wake up sore and fatigued on the sidewalk. Among them are perfectly able workers: plumbers, builders, electricians, teachers, and more who cannot find work due to bogus felony convictions and lack of permanent address. Also among them are the disabled, the elderly, the children, and those bearing children. We have more empty houses than houseless people, and yet our neighbors still sleep on the street. Not plagued enough by the hardships of poverty and houselessness, these folks are hounded and harassed daily by the Mayor’s thugs in the Tampa Police Department. Despite the fact that Tampa remains a haven for human trafficking with a violent crime rate higher than almost 70% of the nation, TPD chooses to bully our most vulnerable neighbors for holding signs and carrying open bottles.

To address the crushing weight of all these problems facing the houseless community, you in the City Council have proposed a new program akin to slapping a bandaid on a gunshot wound. It would provide a few hours’ work for meagre pay, one meal, and a place to sleep for a night. For those who cannot work due to disability and other factors, it would provide nothing. This is the typical bureaucratic response to life-and-death matters: offer the minimum relief necessary to placate the public.

The only acceptable solution to our neighbors’ suffering is a housing-first initiative of Panelák quantity and modern quality. There is no excuse for prioritizing the profits of absentee landlords over the lives of our houseless brothers, sisters, and siblings. While we in the Communist League have no confidence that the City Council will do what is morally just or materially efficient, we will be happy to build an alternative.

Know that with each passing day, you give validity to our assertion the working-class must organize independently from the bourgeoisie and its puppets in the state machinery. We look forward to building power with our houseless comrades, and pledge our solidarity in the struggle against City Council-legislated, police-enforced poverty.

The victory of the Trump campaign, and the catapultic rise of the alt-right movement from the shadows of the internet into the mainstream political paradigm, has stimulated a mobilization of opposition, and an immediate call to action. However, the specter of performative activism and pseudo-outrage continues to blur the lines between genuine action and specious placation.

As noted in Internationale Situationniste #9, the S.I. appropriately identified the neutralization of revolutionary strategies, concepts, and images, for the purpose of emptying them of their subversive content, thus making them compatible with mainstream, bourgeois culture. They formulated this process under the concept of recuperation. Media culture absorbs and diffuses radical ideas as a way to create a homogeneous plane of discourse, in which even the most mutinous of societal critiques are brought under the dominant space of acceptable discussion. In doing so, not only are the proponents of these revolutionary concepts forced to struggle for control over their own definitions, but the revolutionaries themselves are effectively dragged into the realm of their own repurposed concepts, in an attempt to retain coherency and an ideological relation to the general public. The S.I. go on to point out a few notable examples of this process of recuperation:

From Khrushchev to the priests, socialism as a concept has been given the richest variety of contradictory meanings ever consolidated in one single word. Unions have undergone such transformations that at this point the most effective strikes are those organized by the members of the privileged classes, as evidenced by the Belgian doctors this year. Not even anarchy has been spared, as one can tell from the “anarchist opinions” of the pro-Chinese Mr Siné and, even more so, by the anarchist opinions of Le Monde libertaire.¹

Acting in accordance with capital’s need to exert its dominion over nature, it also extends its domination over the domain of language, and over the realm of acceptable expressions of outrage. One needn’t look any further than the outpouring of protests and demonstrations which have materialized over the past few weeks for an example of this subsumption of the limits of radical outrage, with millions participating across the globe in a show of solidarity to those affronted over the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. Multiple sources have stated that the “Women’s March” in particular, was the largest demonstration in Washington DC’s history, and while the ability to organize such a massive gathering of bodies is quite impressive, one must ask how effective this demonstration actually was at conveying its message. Moreover, what exactly is the praxis of these types of demonstrations, and why were the small glimpses of authentic outrage so universally condemned by the media, and similarly by the liberal stratum who made up the majority of the protest’s population? To put it simply, liberal activism can be described as that of an empty signifier, that is to say, it acts as an imitation of the radical activism in which it seeks to replace. It creates a stage for the general public to try on the mask of the political radical, while at the same time allowing for the members of the privileged classes to direct this performance by redefining what radical action actually looks like.The political radical in the sphere of mainstream discourse is no longer the black bloc creating a cacophony of kindled police mobiles and broken windows. The political radical has been recodified as the football star who kneels during the national anthem, or the movie star who gives an apathetic, detached speech during an awards show. The political radical no longer sees action as an instrument to realize systematic change, action is reduced down to means with no end, where the demonstration is a statement and nothing more.

Herbert Marcuse discusses the disarming of political action in his essay Repressive Tolerance:

Thus, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. To take a most controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counter-violence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.²

What Marcuse sets out to illuminate in this analysis is not only the ineffectiveness of bourgeois activism to actualize systemic change, but also how this type of activism is metamorphosed into action which exculpates the oppressive class for their exploitation. Opposition via political activity reconciles itself with the status quo through its own existence. It contains itself within the limitations of the very system it seems to resist. “It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition withinthe framework determined by the constituted authorities.” It is thus apparent that the dominant forms of activism represent not a subversive expression of dissent, but as an implicit consent to be governed.

Engagement in activism constitutes an intervention within the space where politics and everyday life intersect. In this way it reflects the totalitarian nature of a democratic society, which controls the totality of life by appearing as the controlled object. In reality, of course, it is the individual whose life becomes co-opted by the machinery of the state through their own supposed participation in its process. This is the principal contradiction that the modern activist continuously and quixotically struggles to overcome. The politicization of human affairs is a component of the greater social phenomenon of alienation, as people act to strip themselves of autonomy through ritualized self-exploitation.

Politics function to a great extent on an abstract level, an intangible expression of the tangible violence of the state. It is a representational system, distorting images of the world by design. The public discourse that arises from this system is a reflection of a reflection, a second degree of non-reality. The rupture of this elaborate funhouse is seen through an act of physical violence, a refusal to engage in the maddening “dialogues” that form the basis of the mainstream consensus. With continued complacency, and an acceptance of this image of reality, that image becomes actualized. This series of relationships and social processes that constitute this spectacular construction becomes the manifestation of reality itself because it is understood that it is the totality of observable reality. The mystification of these spectacular aspects place them at the center of the social world. Guy Debord examined this phenomenon in his Society of the Spectacle:

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.³

We can see that this mask obstructs a clear view of the reality of society. The “politeness” of modern governance works to produce a societal consensus, one which inverts the truth of objective conditions by presenting helplessness as autonomy, coercion as accord. The maintenance of this phenomenological project is one of the most pressing issues of late capitalist modernity, as the intensification of crisis creates fissures in the objectified worldview.

It is this consensus which the activist, consciously or unconsciously, seeks to reproduce and perpetuate. Activism, as a by-product of capitalist democracy, is the art of manufacturing appearances. What is more important is to display anger, to compress it into a viewable form, rather than to actually act upon it. In the age of social media, this spectacular method can be virtualized and magnified, further diluting whatever emotional message was originally embedded. Activism is both an asocial and social affair, generating crowds that perform mechanistic demonstrations of indignation, brought together by an empty non-message. The deception of such crowds is that they are not so much crowds, but collections of individuals who are more focused on transmitting expressions of false personal investment to each other. The protester does not march towards any specific goal, but to engage in the act of marching itself. Expressive activism (protest politics) is the realization of the theater-form within our social world.

Consider the broken window, universally condemned as a product of “senseless violence”. Destroying a window attacks an ideological barrier as well as a physical one. The normative discourse of our society is one of simulated inaction, concealing brutality within pacifistic rhetoric. To subvert this false language and reveal its true nature is to speak the more “primitive” tongue of physicality. The burning limo and the smashed shopfront are not de-rationalized because they accomplish nothing, in fact the very opposite is true. They symbolize a death of passivity, posing an existential threat to the political mindset. This is why the puppets of the old order must denounce them as acts of insanity.

The limits of rational activity within a sphere of society are set according to the dominant narrative at play. For this reason, riots are depicted as the wrong way to dissent, that is to say, actualized resistance is an improper form of resistance. Violence is not sophisticated, they proclaim, the-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword and so on. Once again, this returns to the very simple contradiction of democratic governance, that of representation versus content. Such a system can only survive by embracing its own contradiction, pursuing violence with greater theatrical flair, the imposition of a terroristic peace. Activism is only an expression of helplessness in the face of this terrible force. The ideological constraints reproduced by the activist are a consequence of state power, and only reinforce it, despite appearances.. As such, political performance is an expression of the cyclical nature of society’s administration. The perpetuation of the democratic ideology allows exploitative relations to produce the conditions for such an ideology to take root.

To point out the danger explicit violence poses to this system is not to say that the fracturing of a sheet of glass is such a momentous occasion. Breaking a window does not blow away the millions of police and soldiers and all their guns. Such an act does not practically undermine the state any more than a peaceful march does. Political violence faces the same problem that political debate does. The attempt to exert pressure and to force demands onto such a powerful entity is like screaming into a deaf ear.

It is violence as a form of action, in its movement beyond structure and symbolism, that threatens the present order. It bypasses the activist’s struggle to overcome the contradiction of their own work, and lays bare the foundations of the capitalist state. Beyond the political, lies the potential for a reconstitution of the human, if only we can cease to reproduce the conditions of our own oppression. It is only when it tries to overcome the state, rather than shape it, that any sort of resistance transforms itself into revolution.

References

[1] “Words and Those Who Use Them” Situationist International Online. Web. 09 Feb. 2017.

Anton Johannsen argues that we need an independent marxist party in order to revitalize the labor movement, not the other way around.

William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood was an experienced union organizer and leader, as well as prominent member of the Socialist Party of America.

Jacobin recently published an issue completely devoted to exploring the history and future of socialist political organization in the United States. In a follow up article on January 28th, Editor Bhaskar Sunkara almost argues for working class political independence – for a working class political party separate from the Democrats. However, he stops short and supports a confused and muddled ‘fusion’ strategy set out by Seth Ackerman in the above mentioned issue.

Sunkara’s support for running socialists as Democrats cites Ackerman’s “Blueprint for a Party.” Ackerman looks at the attempt to form a U.S. Labor Party in the 1990’s and argues it’s reasons for failure were two: 1) the weakening of the labor movement overall, and 2) the failure to attract the support of major national unions. The reason that unions didn’t want to support a labor candidate is because they didn’t want to run Labor Party candidates against Democrats, and subsequently lose to Republicans. Ackerman also argues that the ruling class in the United States restricts ballot access of third parties to the point of making it too difficult to run third party candidates, but does offer that some alternatives of form might show a way forward. Primarily though, Ackerman’s argument is that we need a semi-independent socialist party formation which can either run socialist candidates as Democrats, or run against Democrats entirely when a completely undefined “critical mass” is reached. This is also reflected in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) strategy documents which obviate programmatic politics for pursuing election campaigns as means to win “reforms.”

In their response to Ackerman, Labor Party founding participants Mark Dudzic and Adolph Reed Jr. fall into this same ‘critical mass’ trap that effectively inverts the question at hand. They do indicate that part of the problem of forming a viable socialist party might be the labor leadership, but appeal to the need for a ‘revitalized labor movement’ as the solution to this problem. Just about every socialist wants a revitalized labor movement, and has wanted one for the past sixty years. This line of thinking moves in circles; the labor leadership has wandered astray, and as a result, the unions are flagging. Revitalized unions could set the labor movement back on course, but how can we revitalize unions that are failing?

The reality is that the labor bureaucracy in the United States has relied, since before World War II, on a “transactional politics” both within their own unions and regarding the Democratic Party. Dudzic and Reed are correct on this score. However, this “transactional politics” is based on a self-serving and liberal political outlook: that bureaucratic collective bargaining equals industrial democracy and that union leaders are “labor statesmen” representing the interests of workers in the state. It is this political outlook, or better yet, program, which has set the labor movement on a disastrous course. Reed, Dudzic, and Ackerman agree that a revitalization of the labor movement is a necessary precondition to the formation of a mass socialist party. I would like to argue that this is wrong. The party must come first in order to revitalize the labor movement. Sam Gindin has basically called for the necessity of forming a socialist party to revitalize flagging unions, but fails to articulate what kind of party. Marxists must unite in a political party around a minimum/maximum program. The minimum program must be aimed at revitalizing the labor movement (thereby expanding our base) as well as fighting for the kinds of democratic rights that bring the working class political and social power.

Restrictive Ballot Access?

Ackerman spends a considerable amount of time discussing the challenges of ballot access in the United States. Most of the restrictive legislation on ballot access he cites is from the 1920-1940’s. For example, a law from Florida in the 1930’s required candidates of a party to get 30% of the vote for two consecutive elections in order to get ballot access. Current Florida Statute 99.096 states:

“Minor political party candidates; names on ballot.—Each person seeking to qualify for election as a candidate of a minor political party shall file his or her qualifying papers with, and pay the qualifying fee and, if one has been levied, the party assessment, or qualify by the petition process pursuant to s. 99.095, with the officer and at the times and under the circumstances provided in s. 99.061.”

The cost, according to the Florida Department of State, for a state legislative candidate to get ballot access is $1,781.82. Is that enough of an excuse to not run our own candidates? To not put forward the idea of the politically independent working class? Ackerman cites the recent sabotage efforts of Arizona Republicans against the Libertarian party. Where before they needed 134 signatures to appear on their party’s primary ballot they now need 3,023. Make no mistake, these are brazen attempts by the ruling parties to protect their own dominance and are categorically anti-democratic. However, is 3,000 signatures really an insurmountable hurdle for aspiring mass political parties? Does this justify running our candidates under the same party banner as those who would engage in the same types of sabotage?

The Union Bureaucracy Problem

Ackerman argues that most third parties end up either embroiled in ballot access lawsuits or forced to acquire thousands of petitions as opposed to educating about their party or organizing constituents. These are all problems of tactic in response to what we ought to take as given; the ruling parties will try and sabotage our efforts. Fighting against this is the meat and potatoes of socialist electoral struggle.

In the 1990s, in spite of ballot access challenges, left political activists and union leaders attempted to form a Labor Party in the U.S. It failed. Ackerman cites some of those involved and concludes that it failed because not enough unions supported it. The reason not enough unions supported it?

“…the problem arose from the oldest dilemma of America’s two-party system: running candidates against Democrats risked electing anti-labor Republicans. For unions whose members had a lot to lose, that risk was considered too high.”

Ackerman fails to discuss why the unions don’t want to lose to the Republicans; business unions rely on Democrats for their power more than their own membership. He simply accepts that the failure of the Labor Party effort stems from union membership reliance on the Democratic party. The Labor Party attempt basically took unions as given – dominated by liberal bureaucrats routinely bargaining away strengths for palliatives.

The liberal tradition of union politics sees collective bargaining as the emancipation of the working class. It is assuredly not. Liberals see the workers’ freedom of association and democratic rights to combine as the consummation of Industrial Democracy; workers, free of restrictive court injunctions, government repression and hired guns, became free to join unions and have a voice in the workplace. Industrial Democracy was conquered thanks to the NLRA, and the last vestiges of feudal work relations were rooted out; law came to govern the workplace, so long as workers labored under a contract, as opposed to the unmitigated tyranny of the boss.

Collective bargaining became the favored terrain of the liberal bureaucrat. Over the past 80 or so years, socialists have been critiquing this trend. The main form of this critique has been that collective bargaining as such is inherently reformist and bureaucratic. Unions monopolize the skills of dealing with management in the hands of a professional staff and grievance procedures prioritize a smooth working day over workers rights, militancy, or organization. The standard line is that workers must get active and reclaim their own unions. This is partly true but it misses a crucial set of obstacles. Most leftists treat bureaucracy as purely a problem of position. Even the most dedicated socialist and democrat becomes authoritarian by virtue of their position in an organization. This is false. Bureaucratic treachery is not merely a function of social position. The social position of the labor bureaucracy encourages a particular ideological outlook on the basis of waging day-to-day struggles for partial gains. In the old social democratic movement, this took the form of ‘Bernsteinism’. Eduard Bernstein was a socialist theorist who argued we could reform our way to socialism bit by bit. He famously said “the movement is everything; the goal is nothing.” Many credit the triumph of his ideas for the betrayal of the socialist parties during World War I.But in order for the labor bureaucracy to take control they have to articulate and organize support for a set of political positions. This political outlook of the labor bureaucracy is as crucial to their success as their more concrete sources of power. The logical conclusion here is that there must be an organized force which both argues and organizes for democratic unions where the bureaucrats are thoroughly subordinated to the the membership.

Of course, as Daniel Gaido has pointed out, what actually drove the knife into the back of the Second International was the conservative labor bureaucracy. Kautsky, having defeated the ideological manifestation of labor-bureaucrat reformism within the Social Democratic Party of Germany, could not contend with it’s basis in society. As the German labor bureaucracy began courting American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, committing itself to support for German colonialism, and in general professing an anti-revolutionary politics, the Center and Left of the SPD were outmaneuvered. The unions controlled vastly more money and members than the party on it’s own steam.

This parallels greatly the attempt by Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin, and other leftists to reform the Democratic Party in the 1960-1970’s. They were ultimately betrayed by the conservative union bureaucracy which could not stomach forgoing their personal positions, their strategy of back-room deals and negotiation politics via labor statesmen, and their commitment to supporting the narrow ‘interests’ of their members best exemplified by their support for the war in Vietnam.

Solutions on Offer

Many leftists and marxists agree on the diagnosis; The labor bureaucracy in the United States has long been wedded to a strategy that restricts membership activity, direct action, and quick solution of problems by workers themselves in favor of byzantine grievance procedures that emphasize uninterruption of the production process, staff heavy organizing drives rooted in media pressure and sub contracted PR games and in general giving up the basis of union power; the strike. For some the solution is ‘social movement unionism.’ The SEIU’s “Fight For 15$” was executed in this vein. But it was not an organizing drive; it was a Democratic Party campaign plot and it failed. As they pull their organizers out of middle-sized cities across the U.S. South, workers will be left without contracts or institutions of self-defense on the job. The basis of power in these unions isn’t a well educated, organized and active membership ready to strike, but a relationship with the democratic party and the levers of the labor-regulation apparatus. Former I.W.W. member Erik Forman has advanced a similar critique; the bureaucrats result from the reality of the capitalist division of labor in society. But Forman proposes a sort of silver-bullet solution; we need more salts.

The I.W.W.’s problems with growth show why this isn’t a solution. The I.W.W. has member activists in droves. The solidarity-union organizing model of salt-led campaigns doesn’t work because it is molecular in a one-sided sense. The aim is to get supporters to salt into a few shops and build committees, and just continue to build that up in a linear fashion. While this is a necessary part of any union organizing campaign, it is hamstrung by a set of misconceptions.

The first is a belief in linear growth. While we need to apply the tactic of salts, we need to fit it into a broader strategy of growth that begins day one with our target in mind. We cannot simply continue to add salts to an existing campaign, we need to have a strategy in place to secure workers in their gains and coordinate across large groups. I.W.W. campaigns have been very small because they’ve relied on organizer-salts with free time rather than paying people to do the work. This is tied to the problem of bureaucracy and the division of labor in our society; workers need to work to eat. They may go above and beyond and volunteer, but that will always be severely limited.

The second and third problems are linked. The I.W.W. wants a union based on militant direct action and membership involvement, which is a fine goal. But the dominant critique of business unions in the I.W.W. is simplistically anti-bureaucratic; they link paying people for work and contract unionism as the source of bureaucracy. Their solution is to simply lop off the bureaucratic limb and be done with it, by eliminating virtually all paid staff and refusing to sign contracts.

This way of thinking is somewhat reactionary-utopian; it wants to wind back the clock of history to a point when the workplace wasn’t directly in the legal realm and remained the almost-feudal fiefdom of the employer. In reality the salt-organizers all get fired and everybody goes home with no lasting union, in large part because of a principled refusal to sign contracts. Whether a union signs a contract or not, it’s always engaged in some form of collective bargaining with employers. Workers enter into contracts everyday with their employers whether they have a union or not. Rather than try and bring back the wild west syndicalism of the the 1910’s, we need to ask ourselves; what workplace rights will put power into the hands of union members at work?

Social movement unionism doesn’t fare much better. As Sam Gindin has pointed out, ‘social movement’ unionism fails because it is incoherent and divided;

“Yet there are few (if any) mass social movements in North America, and their resource base pales in comparison to that which unions enjoy. Though movements raise the banner of participatory democracy, their institutional weaknesses often result in less-than-democratic internal procedures.

Where they focus on particular identities or single issues, their political outlook is often just as narrow (sometimes even narrower) than those of unions. Their anticapitalist élan often entails radical protest tactics, but they rarely consider what it would actually take to confront the capitalist state and overcome the inertial power, resiliency, and resoluteness of the capitalist class.”

Gindin argues correctly that we need a united socialist party to effectively pursue our aims in the labor movement, but defines both this party and these union reform aims somewhat vaguely.

Marxists understand that the basis for working class politics is the political independence of the working class. The working class can build its political power only on the firm basis of its political and social independence. Bureaucrat led unions ingratiate their employees to their employers, refuse to organize the unorganized, and link up with political parties that unite workers and capitalists. Workers become dependent on unions that pit their members against each other and support individual employers over unity among workers in the labor movement.

This is because the labor bureaucrats and their narrow vision have beaten back the socialists, who remain divided and working at cross purposes. This makes working with subsections of the petit-bourgeoisie seem inviting; perhaps we can work with some democrats. Perhaps we’ll have to compromise with some union bureaucrats in order to get our numbers up, attain an audience, or even just fight off attacks. What appear to be pragmatic compromises for the sake of growth are in reality compromises with building independent class power.

Party Problems

Ackerman argues that the Labor Party’s position to maintain an independent ballot line was a mistake. Dudzic agrees that the party “coalesced” too soon- that there wasn’t a “critical mass” present to ensure a victory over Republicans and Democrats. However, Ackerman’s blueprint, once he gets to it, has problems. He writes:

“[A socialist party] project probably wouldn’t have been feasible in the past, due to campaign-finance laws. For most of the last four decades, the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA), along with similar laws in many states, would have left any such organization with little alternative but to fundraise through a political action committee (PAC). That PAC would have been limited to giving a maximum of $5,000 (the current threshold) to each of its candidates per election, and barred from taking money from unions or collecting donations larger than $5,000 from individuals. That kind of fundraising could never support a national organization.

…All of these restrictions would be waived if, like the DNC or RNC, the group registered as a “party committee.” But there’s a catch: a group can only register as a party committee if it runs the ballot-access gauntlet at the state level (a requirement from which Democrats and Republicans are exempt), then wins a ballot line and runs its candidates on it. (Here we find one of the many reasons scholars have described the FECA as a “major-party protection act.”)”

As already stated, Ackerman thinks that ballot access for an aspiring mass party is too restrictive. His preferred option is the “Carey Model,” which has been vindicated in a post-citizens united court case. The idea here is to incorporate as a social welfare organization which does not have limits on spending in exchange for explicit support for political candidates and political education. However, these candidates still need ballot access and will ultimately face state repression if they succeed. Ackerman mentions in passing a key point – this organization would require self-imposed financial disclosures.

This model has some merit. It does clean up some of the funding restrictions, but the strategic problems remain – the old social democratic parties were eventually compromised by the labor bureaucracy’s monopolization on finances. We have to break the union bureaucracy’s control over their organizations and restrict their donations in such a way as to limit their de facto control of the party; party decisions need to be made democratically through party channels and party money needs to come from members, not large outside donations. We can’t wait for the labor movement to reform itself, we have to start the work of forming a party now.

We don’t just want working class political independence in the abstract. Marxists argue that the end goal of working class politics is putting the working class in political control of society. Thus, the party we need is a Marxist one, which recognizes that the fight for socialism requires bringing the working class to political power. This is reflected by the minimum/maximum idea of a program advanced by Engels and Marx and adopted at Erfurt. The minimum program outlines mostly economic and democratic reforms that taken together amount to the conquest of political power by the working class through extreme democracy while the maximum program is communism. Founding a Marxist party right now is crucial for us to have any coherent and revitalizing project in the labor movement. The demands of the minimum program must include democratic ones with respect to political power in society, especially with respect to the uneven realization of basic rights among gender and racial minorities. However, we also need to press for economic demands that guide our fight in the unions for building workers’ power at work.

With regard to the fear of splitting the liberals when we run our own candidates, what Marx argued in his 1850 Address to the Communist League is as true today as ever:

“Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.”

It is to Jacobin and the DSA’s merit that they have a publication with such wide readership willing to discuss these pressing issues. It is also to their very severe deficit that they continue to waver on the need for an independent socialist party with a clear program. Perhaps at this point some DSA members could propose a Draft Program, to at least begin charting the discussion of uniting the Marxist left. I suspect there would be much to debate about the draft program, but it would put us on the path toward unification as opposed to wandering in the swamp of movementism dominated by the Democratic party and the current union bureaucracy.We can see that on the one hand, socialists interested in building a political party chalk up their own limitations to a decaying labor movement; and argue for a vague and ill-defined revitalization. On the other hand, contemporary syndicalists and anti-party socialists argue for a similarly rudderless revitalization effort, though based on a mirage of linear growth and dedicated volunteer hyper activism. Often these positions intermingle, but rarely do they take the form of a systematic or programmatic approach to the U.S. labor movement. What’s needed is for socialists to agree on a program for organized labor in the United States, and pursue a united policy to implement it. That includes a strategy for labor movement revitalization on the basis of socialist principles.

Further Reading

Labor
Nelson Lichtenstein: Labor’s War At Home – Details the rise of the Labor Bureaucracy during WWIIChristopher Tomlins: The State and the Unions – Details the legal history of Unions in the U.S. in the 20th century.Marty Glaberman: Wartime Strikes – Writings of a marxist worker-organizer on strikes during WWII and the post-war strike wave.Stan Weir: Singlejack Solidarity – Similar to the above, marxist worker who recounts among other things, 1930’s strikes and the 1946 Oakland General Strike.
Melvyn Dubofsky: The State and Labor in Modern America – Argues that unions and workers benefited greatly at different points in history by having sympathetic figures in government positions.Daniel Gaido: Marxism and the Union Bureaucracy: Karl Kautsky on Samuel Gompers and the German Free Trade Unions